Emerging directly from New Jersey, hip-pop artist J-Carter releases his latest album, titled ‘Take Hip-Hop Back’. A long and articulated exhibition of J-Carter’s diverse talent, through the 30 tracks that make up the release the artist ranges skillfully and organically through styles and genres that bring into the mix transversal influences that come from R&B, pop, and afro, all placed in an atmospheric acoustic hip-hop.
Surgically penetrating, the flow that J-Carter offers us in the more than two hours of duration of the album is like a prod that thanks to its lyrics runs through the listener’s mind, body and soul.
Catchy hooks, tight rhythms and great lyrical content are the ingredients of an album thanks to which this artist manages to bring to the table a hip-hop that is full-bodied and at the same time richly granular, enhanced by the fluency of his vocabulary as a talented lyricist.
Offering us a compelling blend of old school vibes and contemporary atmospheres, ‘Take Hip-Hop Back’ sounds like a gripping exaltation of J-Carter’s style, leading him to stand out in a hip-hop music scene that too often feels lackluster or lacking personality.
Maintaining his creative identity and his artistic soul, he keeps in mind what he believes should be the definition of hip-hop, regardless of what society leans on. And we must say that it is an exquisitely convincing message.
In such a large album, with so much to say, there are many gems that we would like to mention, each for multiple different reasons. In order to avoid mentioning all of the tracks, we’ll limit ourselves to those that struck us most at the very first listening.
First and foremost we want to mention ‘Frontin’, for how it gripped our stomach with its visceral and overwhelming, epically evocative approach, sealed by the vibrant low kick and the saturating synths of the next track, ‘Go Hard at Em’.
Around the middle of the album, ‘Keeps on Raining’ brightens the sound spectrum with its choruses and their more sunny soul hues, that make us land in the more melancholy and tender ‘Let It Go’.
The fifteenth track comes to reintroduce a sense of rhythmic tension: here we find all the controversial transport of ‘Miss My Baby’, and then we slip into the introspective, dreamy and atonal parenthesis that is ‘Nothin but the Best’.
This is an alternative drift that nonetheless is easy for J-Carter, who however continues to surprise us with the old school tone of ‘Stoic Lover’, to close once again in an impeccable way, with the low-fi style of ‘The One for Myself’.
As we said above, we could, and we would like to, go on for days detailing as much as possible the myriad of nuances that J-Carter exhibits in the over two hours of ‘Take Hip-Hop Back’. Needless to say, the best thing you can do is schedule some free time and dedicate two hours to listening to this unmissable album.
J-Carter’s ‘Take Hip-Hop Back’ is available on streaming on all major digital platforms, at the following link.
To get in touch with J-Carter and discover all his music, visit the following links: